Originally posted by Richard Tarleton
View Post
But where did Stalin come from? (it's OK, I know...).....Mao Zedong.....
I quite understand how socialists might hope for better outcomes, but it's surely a point that revolutions (not just socialist/communist ones, I hasten to say) do generally seem to end up with corrupt, autocratic self-serving elites surrounding themselves with the trappings of power and repression, ruling out the possibility of change, while the people suffer all sorts of privations, censorship and worse.... I'm still waiting for an example of a socialist regime that really did/has delivered compassionate outcomes (to refer back to the OP's question, and Richard's response to same) - apart from the ones which have existed within the framework of bourgeois democracy, such as in Scandinavian countries....
The question of violence - namely is it possible to get rid of capitalism without force - would divide the left between those who argued for constitutional change and those who felt this would allow the momentum to slip away and counterforces to undermine progress by means both legal and illegal. The latter - what today would be described as the far left - felt that the sheer logistical superiority in numbers of the working class, effectively organised to stop counter-mobilisations, would force the ruling class to surrender power and control with minimal physical casualties resulting. In Russia a divided left was faced with the recalcitrant Romanovs, starvation on the western front, a politically moderate-dominated Duma apparently as bereft of ideas on the way forward as today's Tories, and soviets (in the original meaning) starting to take decisions into their own hands over running industry and society at large. In considering the "model" for change and its aftermath presented by the Soviet Union, while from today's vantage it is possible to question the ways in which the Bolsheviks pre-empted some of the decision-making processes encripted into the new soviet means of democratic accountability and control, so as to precipitate the relatively small action of the putsch which removed the Kerensky government, there would seem to be no doubt that, were said government to pass legitimacy over the superiority of the soviets, the western powers would still have invaded on the side of the "white" armies responsible for the 3 plus years of civil war. War leads to famine - what were the Bolsheviks to do? Throw up their hands, say the whole initiative was a big mistake, hand power back to some kind of presumably internationally co-ordinated body charged with handing back industry and business to its friends? Live to fight another day? Scarcity leads to queues, queues to policing, policing to bureaucracy, bureaucracy to behind the backs decision-making, and the latter to the New Economic Plan. Without precedents for guidance, and isolated nationally from the few concurrent revolutions taking place in other more advanced countries such as Germany, the Bolsheviks were forced into taking measures of expediency just to get things moving. Getting things moving involved top-down orders diametrically in contravention of the original principles defining the dictatorship of the proletariat as bottom-up democracy - from which the rise of the opportunist ingratiator Stalin was a mere step, and the physical elimination of the original leaders of the revolution, Trotsky included.
From there we can see that Hitler's unsuccessful quest to obliterate what had become of soviet power - a mindless venture borne of ideological blindness when you think of the 1939Hitler-Stalin pact - invested part-responsibility for fascism's defeat in the Communist east; and from there emanated the models deemed suitable in Stalinist terms for change in countries that would once have been considered prematurely unsuited to socialism, where change could be justified in terms of nationhood building outside the aegis of western economic interests, national liberation, emancipation from colonialism and the neo-colonialism of perpetual indebtedness. The 100 different varieties of post-capitalism, all in one way or another brought about by revolts within the armed forces, can be described as distortions of what might have been permitted to unfold were history to be more straightforward! But the main point is that what had once been sidelined as incidental - the sustainability of the planet's ability forever to keep feeding the voracious unfulfillable appetite of capitalism as a system per se; the impossibility outside of a class-based understanding to reach a definition of common humanity which is not identity-predicated and self-divisive (ie internalised) - is at last beginning to dawn... and this is already beginning to impact on the ways in which younger generations are now campaigning from an evidential basis of more holistic thinking than previous generations were able to.
] , and allow for taking the eye of the ball, of course, it does prove that if basic essentials like health and education are sufficiently funded and maintained, it doesn't have to cost huge amounts of money."
Comment